Posted
by
timothyon Thursday October 06, 2011 @12:32PM
from the back-to-gold-oil-and-moose dept.

zentigger writes "At approximately 06:36 EDT Thursday, October 6, 2011, the Anik F2 satellite experienced an attitude control issue and lost earth lock, affecting C, Ku and Ka services. The satellite went into safety mode and moved from pointing to the earth to pointing to the sun. This has put most of Northern Canada in the dark as all internet and phone services come in over F2."

I was living in Iqaluit [wikimedia.org] at the time, but was actually in flight to Pond Inlet [wikimedia.org] at the northern tip of Baffin Island when the outage occurred. It was a very bizarre feeling to arrive in one of the most remote communities in the world and find I'd stepped back in time by a century.

Telephone, TV, and most other means of communications simply stopped. But people in the Arctic are adaptable. They don't last long if they aren't. Emergency communications were hopped from airport-to-pilot-to-ground from the hamlet (It's a LONG way from any other habitation). We hunkered down, and yes, politely waited for news.

As the wikipedia link indicates, we waited for days while the local telco flew technicians across the territory to reposition their dishes and get services running.

It was the experience of living in a remote location - close to the technological edge, as it were - that led me to drop what I was doing a few years later and leave for the South Pacific, where I live today. (Also: When I left Iqaluit, I promised myself I'd never be cold again.) I live in a country with only satellite service, and have worked for the last 8 years helping to improve communications here.

(Not so) amusingly, about a year and a half after I arrived, the satellite providing service to our region suffered catastrophic failure [imagicity.com]. I was able to use my experience in the Arctic to help convince people here of the dangers of relying on a single source of data communications. We should be getting a submarine cable in 2012-13, and once that happens, I just might be able to rely on Internet again.

This is the perfect chance to find out the real cost of a first world nation not having internet access. We need these numbers to make better laws about internet access restriction and even to decide whether it should be a right.

Northern Canada is not really a first-world region. It's mostly empty, frozen land and remote communities of native people living pretty basic lifestyles. Not much in common with the cities in the South.

What do the UK, US, germany, Japan, and Canada all have in common? That's right, they all have polar bears.
What do Ghana, Zimbabwe, and Afghanistan have in common? That's right, no polar bears at all.

So as you can see, countries with polar bears are developed, those without are less developed. Q.E.D. Canada is a developed country because it has polar bears.

There are only individual rights. The 'civil or labor rights' are actually entitlements given by government decree to some, while imposing obligations on others. Same with anything else that you have to be provided by somebody. It's an entitlement, not a right.

I had this same discussion a number of times, why do people never seem to understand basic concepts?

'Right' is a concept that is only meaningful to describe a relationship between an individual an government, because gov't is a system, not an individual.

Relationships between private individuals and businesses are covered by criminal and contract law.

Having a 'right' to Internet would require this to be an obligation upon businesses that would have to provide this entitlement, obviously this would make it into an 'essential' service and the prices, by the way, would immediately be much higher than what they are now.

See health care, insurance, education and AT&T monopoly that was given to it by government, which destroyed 4000 competitors for a good example of how that shit works.

'Right' is a concept that is only meaningful to describe a relationship between an individual an government, because gov't is a system, not an individual.

I don't think this is accurate. You have the right to speak, and I don't have the right to stop you. I just have the right to not assist you in any way, or allow you to use my property to execute that right. This is true in individual transactions, even when there is no government involved.

Northern Canada is the sparsely-populated area that's too friggin cold for most Canadians. There are only a handful of small towns up there, primarily native americans and the occasional labour town. Not only is the population very very small, but I'd wager that very few of them are technically minded. The mere fact that all of their telecomms are handled by a lone satellite should be a pretty big hint about how minimal their needs are. It's

This is the perfect chance to find out the real cost of a first world nation not having internet access.

You haven't been to northern Canada have you? It's about as sparsely populated a place as you are ever likely to find. The vast majority of the population lives within a few hours drive of the southern border.

Even the editors* noticed that and added the parenthetical clarification.

"In the dark" does not mean "in the literal darkness, without the power to generate light or heat." I.e., not a power generation or distribution problem, which is the expected context of the stock phrase "in the dark".

They mean "In the INTARWEBS dark." As in, no Facebook, no Twitter, no YouTube.

You know, an actual crisis.

*Seriously. How bad do you have to be, that the world-famous Slashdot Editor Corps feels compelled to actually edit

Although you are correct in that it is not a literal power outage, it is far more than just the "INTARWEBS", because so much in the North depends on Satellite communication.

From the article:"People in Iqaluit are reporting they are without cell phone service and long-distance calling, bank machines and debit-card machines. At least one bank in the city has not opened today as a result. Flights are also being delayed."

From the article:
"People in Iqaluit are reporting they are without cell phone service and long-distance calling, bank machines and debit-card machines. At least one bank in the city has not opened today as a result. Flights are also being delayed."

From the book of Common F. Sense:
"Banks and other critical infrastructure services should probably consider a backup land-line. It wasn't that long ago that ATM/debit card machines were dialing up to the banks. A slow bank transaction is a hell of a lot better than NO bank transaction."

Along those same lines, don't suppose there would be any industry-wide regulation that requires that banks and other critical infrastructure services actually have a backup connection or plan to mitigate mass outages like

Ok... I actually checked the population numbers... Canada total - 35MM. Northwestern Territories - 43,000. Nunavummiut - 33,000. Biggest cities in each are 20,000 and 6,000, respectively. So, that is a whole 0.2% without internet service if the whole territories are out.

Whatever idiot moderated this informative should go look for a sale on a new hyperbole detector. There's roughly that many people above 68N, and there's a city of nearly 1,000,000 [wikipedia.org] north of 52N. The general point is valid though - the parts of Canada affected by this are expansive and barely populated.

I live in the Yukon. Only one of our communities, Old Crow, is on a satellite uplink. Everywhere else in the territory is linked by either fiber or a microwave shot. However, in the NWT and Nunavut they have many remote communities like Old Crow that don't even have road access, and therefore satellite is the only realistic option.

Only those communities that are remote enough to depend solely on satellite are affected. FTA: "Northwestel said all communities across Nunavut, N.W.T. and Yukon that receive their long distance calling and data service via satellite are affected."

It’s a little bay on Kluane Lake. It’s named that because they lost so much equipment there while building the Alcan (Alaskan) Highway. There’s not much there. The nearby village of Burwash has a gas station, restaurant, and hotel, and that’s about it. There are a number of Athabaskans (Northern Tutchone I think, or maybe the northernmost Southern Tutchone) living around there, as well as a few white folks. It’s a beautiful place in the summer, but it’s ferociously cold a

This could be really bad for some of the medical clinics. I could be wrong but I think I read somewhere that a good number of small clinics in that area depend on video conferencing so that staff can consult with doctors in larger clinics. Add in the need to call for medevac and other services and it could really cause some issues. I bet the Ham operators are busy right now.Maybe the should keep a hot backup in orbit? Yes I know that would be expensive.

Safety means safety for the life of the satellite, i.e. you give up on the mission and try to keep the satellite alive until someone can diagnose and fix the original problem.

If you lose attitude control (or lose track of your orientation) you need to orient the spacecraft to get power with no a priori knowledge of your orientation. At Geosyncrhonous altitude, the Earth is only 18.75 degrees wide, and it is surprisingly difficult to find by searching, and while you are searching, you likely have no power fr

Most satellite safety modes involve pointing some primary axis at the Sun because it ensures solar power gets to at least part of the solar arrays while minimizing the liklihood that the communications fixtures would interfere with instruments on other satellite platforms. It's a good, "safe and minimally powered," mode to try to recover from.

Man parts of Canada are just the beautiful but it is such a tragic county.Canada could have had American know how, French culture, and British government.Instead it got American culture, British know how, and French government.

You see, it's the northern part of Canada (furthest from you) which has no internet. Between them and you is southern Canada, who happens to still have internet, as well as an overly-extreme pride for hockey and beer. Of course, I wouldn't expect an American to comprehend his relative geographical location:)

Remember, Canada is a big place. 75% of all Canadians live within 90 miles of the US border. So keep this in mind while you read all of the comments saying what a calamity this is for Canadians. Northern Canada -- and I say this as a Canadian, though some may disagree (like we disagree about what it means to be in Eastern Canada or Western Canada) -- generally are those who live above 55-60 degrees N which is an exceptionally small percentage of the total population.

A dedicated satellite isn't "a little redundancy". Reasonable levels of redundancy are already built into the satellite still up there awaiting repairs, as well as built into planes being flown across barren territory.

The possibility of it having a chance to save a single life will never justify that kind of expense. Even if you knew an MP would certainly lose their life, few wouldn't balk at the half billion dollar price tag of saving them. With that kind of money you can have a 100% certainty to save n

I would wager that most of the folks living in rural Canada do, in fact, own and operate radios as both a hobby and as an emergency backup. I know radios are very popular in rural areas in the States. I would be surprised if any of the folks roughing it in the Canadian wilderness did not have some sort of radio gear that they know how to use.

Go read this page [dawn.com] about how "The humble old rooftop TV aerial could bring superfast Internet to even the most remote shack in the Australian Outback and help solve the problem of how to connect isolated communities across the globe."

It looks like they use a different satellite, but the News section discusses the sorts of things that affect service and if you scroll down the list you'll find traffic data for communities served by satellite.

Outages are common, and can be caused by anything from the town's electrical generators going down to the nature of the satellite's orbit.

Satellite is pretty much the only option for rural areas. The Canadian north is REALLY, REALLY, big. Many of the camps up there are temporary and not worth running permanent infrastructure up there.
Alot of the customers of satelite services are commercial applications. Oil companies, Loggers, other natual resources. The people that live up there are mostly in small towns or cities, but that still leaves millions of square kms that are very remote.
Would you really invest in running a fiber to a camp

From what I understand, northern Canada is somewhat remote. In fact, I understand there to be limited road access above the 75th parallel in much of the country. I would posit that it would be unfeasibly expensive to lay and maintain fiber cable out through difficult a media (permafrost) to support communities that number in the dozens.

Satellites seem to me to offer the best way to connect small settlements spread out across millions of square miles of the Canadian back country.

Check your atlas. I'm pretty sure there are no roads above the 75th parallel because there is a dearth of land up there upon which to build roads.:-) I think you mean 55th parallel, which would be accurate.

Check your atlas. I'm pretty sure there are no roads above the 75th parallel because there is a dearth of land up there upon which to build roads.:-) I think you mean 55th parallel, which would be accurate.

Sometimes I would just kill for a way to revise my slashdot comments. About 3 minutes after I posted, I did some googling and found that the 60th parallel [wikipedia.org] separates the lower Canadian provinces from NWT, Yukon, and Nunavut.

Don't know where the long-distance roads stop, though. I was just in Quebec and remember looking at a road atlas to see how far north the road from Chicoutimi reached -- for some reason, the 75th stuck in my head. Don't know why, though...

Simple: economics. It costs money to support and maintain. In a country as large as Canada there's a lot of infrastructure (rail, roads, air traffic, mail, and in some cases telephone) that is paid or subsized by the federal (or provincial) government. For instance, there's a a beautifully maintained ~200km highway stretch between Barrie and Sudbury (Ontario) with very little in between. You have very limited wireless coverage as well (not even talking cell phones here, just old-fashioned radio/CB), imp

Won't work. Hikers in the Canadian wilderness have long carried a piece of fiber optic cable with them. If they get lost, they just bury the cable and hitch a ride back when the backhoe comes to dig it up.

Because as soon as you get fiber to the North, you're done? Nunavut has a land area bigger than Alaska and 1/20th the population. The largest town is only 7,000 people. The rest are spread across dozens of tiny communities across the north.

Bear in mind that the French deaths in WWII all occurred in the European theatre, while those of the US occurred in both Europe and Asia. I think it is fair to say that the French did their fair share of fighting and dying in both wars.

The Soviet Union had it worse and still they preferred to endure cold, hunger and death before surrendering to the enemy. Point in question: Leningrad/St. Petersburg as well as Stalingrad/Volgograd. Read what happened there and you will realize that the French, with the clear exception of the partisans, acted like freaking cowards.

The French (and Brits) had monumentally incompetent leadership in WWI. General Pershing deserves much credit for refusing to use American troops as replacement cannon fodder for the frogs and brits. Between Napoleon and WWI balls were bred out of the French population and culture.

I'm betting most of the French deaths in WWII were fighting _for_ the Axis or civilians killed in bombing raids. In ether case the fact remains they were unable to defend their own country from a similarly sized nation.